Editorial: End harsh penalties for kids talking about weapons in school

In a Pennsylvania elementary school, a 5-year-old was suspended from kindergarten for 10 days for telling another girl she was going to shoot her.

With what? The “weapon” was a pink Hello Kitty toy gun that blows soapy bubbles.

When will this stupid zero-tolerance enforcement end?

When the child’s family complained, the punishment was reduced to a two-day suspension.

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That’s no less absurd, and the family is still fighting the punishment. The family’s attorney said Mount Carmel Area school district officials called the girl a “terrorist threat” for the gun comment, made as the two girls waited for a school bus.

The 5-year-old didn’t take the bubble-blowing gun with her to school. Was she angry? Was this a spat between 5-year-olds?

That wasn’t reported. The attorney said the child has never fired a real gun and is the “least terroristic person in Pennsylvania.”

According to one report, the girl underwent a psychological evaluation. She passed, although it’s fair to ask if she’ll bear a couple of scars from interrogations that brought her to tears.

We don’t know what kind of rules and guidelines prompted such a harsh response to a clear nonthreat.

We can infer that the district’s rules say there must be no toy weapons at school and no talk of using the most innocuous of “weapons” against another person.

But even real weapons aren’t always what they seem. Five years ago, a 10-year-old girl was taken into police custody because she’d brought a steak knife to school.

She wasn’t threatening or furtively showing it to classmates. She brought it to cut the steak her mother had packed. The child drew a 10-day suspension.

We understand how tragedies culminating in the massacre at Newtown make the thought of weapons in schools anathema.

But what would a two-week suspension have told a 5-year-old that couldn’t have been communicated better in a talk with her teacher and parents?

What are we to think of professional educators and administrators who hand out this nonsense? Do they have the slightest understanding of how five-year-old minds work??

It appears they don’t. It appears the administrators involved in this fiasco are living down to the worst stereotypes of the unimaginative, bungling bureaucrat.